Bennett, John Also / Giovanni di Domenico / Pak Yan Lau: Tidal Perspectives LP

The unstoppable John Also Bennett returns with 'Tidal Perspectives', teaming up with Giovanni di Domenico and esteemed sound artist Pak Yan Lau, pooling their shared ideas into a glistening, oily pool of prepared piano, Rhodes, woodwind and triggered oscillations.  As with all JAB’s work, it’s gorgeous, celestial and highly meditative biz, tipped if yr into Arve Henriksen, Visible Cloaks or Jon Hassell. We're still getting to grips with Bennett's brilliant 'Music For Save Rooms 1+2' set, and this one's already tugging us in a slightly different direction. JAB, Domenico and Lau headed into a studio in Brussels just over a year ago and emerged with a full album's worth of shimmering, meditative material. Dominico, a Brussels-based Italian pianist who's collaborated with Jim O'Rourke, Arve Henriksen and Toshimaru Nakamura, among others, handles Fender Rhodes, while Belgian composer, improviser and sound artist Lau, known for her unconventional instrumentation and ritual music-inspired minimalism, plays prepared piano thru a series of effects. Bennett wields his trusty bass flute, this time using it for both weightless, breathy tones and to trigger electronics; creating an uncanny fourth world fusion of vertiginous new age textures adorned with damaged, electro-acoustic decorations. 'Melt' is particularly absorbing, an 11-minute dreamscape that winds Bennett's ethereal woodwind vapours around percussive prepared piano. Lau makes her instrument sound like a gong or a harp at first, scraping it to tease out dissonant tones, while Domenico adds the magickal final component, lavishing the session with tape-warbled electric piano twinkles that sound as if they could have been lifted from Vangelis's 'Blade Runner' sessions. For the 18-minute title track, Domenico's melancholy, overdriven Rhodes takes centre stage, developing like slow cinema, while Bennett's flute provides the emotional pull. ‘Tidal Perspectives’ is an album that refernces New Age synth canon, but also the work of classic minimalists like Philip Glass and Éliane Radigue, comfortably drifting from tempered tonality into skewed, ancestral oddness. It's exploratory but warm-hearted; experimental music that feels so close you can almost touch it. If you're into Arve Henriksen's melty cinematics, or Visible Cloaks' precise, glassy minimalism, you’ll drift very nicely into this one.